Sociologist Jennifer Jones to convene Afro-Latino conference

Published: October 17, 2014

Jennifer Jones, Institute for Latino Studies faculty fellow and assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology, will convene a conference on Afro-Latinos in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas on October 31, 2014.

The conference and an accompanying volume, for which Professor Jones will serve as co-editor, explore broad questions of black identity and representation, transnationalism and diaspora, with a particular interest in research on Afro-Latinos in the United States.

Jones notes that research on Afro-Latinos in the United States is underrepresented in the existing literature and thus this project “will bring to light new scholarship on race and ethnicity in the United States, emphasizing work that uses a distinctly hemispheric approach. We will build up from the U.S. context to critically examine how blackness, and more specifically, afrolatinidad, is understood, transformed, and re-imagined.”

Speakers for this national conference include Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, and Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, editors of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States and leaders of the Afrolatin@ Forum. Other participants are junior scholars whose work is the most promising in this field, such as Melissa Castillo-Garsow of Yale University, Lorgia Garcia Peña of Harvard University, and Patricia Herrera of the University of Richmond.

The conference will be held at Remick Commons in Carole Sandner Hall on Friday, October 31 from 8:45 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The full conference schedule is available at latinostudies.nd.edu/afrolatinoprogram.